


Partridge (pear tree not included)

by FlamingoQueen



Series: A Hazy Shade of Winter [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Biting, Canon-Typical Violence, Cryofreeze, Dehumanization, Gaslighting, Gen, Hydra, KGB, Sassy Bucky Barnes, See endnotes for content warnings, The General - Freeform, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, did I mention the birds?, holiday theme, no really, slight bird obsession, so many birds - Freeform, standard Winter Soldier trauma umbrella, the Soviets still have Bucky, there’s also lots of garland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-10-01 22:06:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17252243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: The garland strung along the upper railings tells him where he is (the fucking Kursk base), who is working on him (fucking HYDRA), what they’re putting him through (so fucking cold), and what’s expected of him (…he tends to draw a blank here; there’s only so much garland can help with).The birds are the most interesting of the objects tucked into the greenery. They shine and glitter in the flickering, buzzing fluorescent lights, and sometimes say hello. Not at all like real birds, though he can’t recall when he last had an opportunity to stare incessantly at any actual, non-garland-haunting birds.He may be going a little stir-crazy.(Or: *cracks egg into skillet* And this is the Winter Soldier’s mind with absolutely nothing to occupy his thoughts but some bird-themed Christmas decorations along the upper railings. Naturally, everything is horrible.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a prequel series to an unposted WIP Bucky recovery fic (because why not join that bandwagon, even if you're very nearly half a decade late to the party?). 
> 
> The series leans toward MCU canon with a little 616 comics verse thrown in for flavor. Series compliance with canon comes to a screeching halt after CA: WS, though it does scavenge a bit of what we see in CA: CW flashbacks. 
> 
> The General who shows up here is the General Karpov from the 616 comics. MCU Karpov is his grandson, and will appear in later ficlets. ((Bucky as family heirloom? Anybody? Any takers? For mother Russia? Going once? *crickets*))

**—Underground HYDRA-run KGB facility, Kursk Oblast, December 1957—**

  
The upper railings are all strung with garland.

He can see it from the pit, which is what they call his prep room in the Kursk base.

It’s a little tacky, calling his prep room “the pit.” Maybe even a bit mean-spirited, but that’s HYDRA for you. Fuckers. They had a lot of mottos, most of them stupid, but none of those mottos were “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” Still, he’s got to admit that “the pit” is about as accurate as anything else would be, and probably more so. 

He imagines it as the people might see it, looking down from the brightly lit concentric landings outside their offices and housing areas into the shadowy sub level deep in the middle of their concrete base, with the metal railings and safety bars, the chair, the tiled nook with the drains in the floor, the metal tables and flashing monitors, the metal bench bolted into the wall behind the bar-lined door with the squealing hinges, the curve of the cryochamber with its perpetually obscured glass—either fog and condensation or creeping ice crystals.

What else would they call a big, roughly circular hole even deeper underground than the rest of the base, lit by flickering fluorescent bulbs and housing an occasionally screaming and increasingly dead-eyed automaton? How could anyone refer to this place, so complete with all the tools needed for the care and upkeep of codename Winter Soldier, as anything other than “the pit?”

 _They could call it the prep room_ , he supposes bitterly, _the way every other support team in every other base does. Common fucking courtesy._ Every base has a prep room, after all, and most of them have all the same things stashed inside that prep room. Or maybe it’s just every base he’s been stored in. Sometimes he loses track of the facts that surround him. This is just one instance of many.

It would bother him, forgetting things, but his forgetfulness pleases the General, and sometimes he is rewarded for a particularly empty stretch of thought.

But the garland.

He can look up from his chair, when they let him sit in it, and see the garland beyond the halo, looping along the railings all the way up past his sight lines. He wouldn’t be surprised to learn that green fuzzy shit went all the way to the top. He _would_ be surprised if he ever saw the top, even in his chair, which is very nearly but not quite in the dead center of the pit.

The support team in this base seems to be uncomfortable with his chair. He has no idea why, since none of them ever get put into it, or strapped down against it, or electrocuted by the halo above it. But for whatever reason, they only let him sit in his chair while they prepare the halo for a wipe, or while he’s receiving maintenance to the Arm. Or during their prep for another round of cryofreeze testing.

It’s been a while, or at least he thinks it has, since he was last allowed to simply _rest_ in his chair. They don’t even let him sit in it for biochemical maintenance. He has to sit on the bench behind the bars while all the IVs empty their bags of mystery chemicals into his right arm. Enzymes, something called amino acids. Calories. They don’t lock him down and snake tubes into his nose and down his throat like some of the other support teams. If he were an idiot, he’d suppose this was a kindness on their part. But he’s not. They need his stomach empty because they put him in the cold several times a week here.

He wishes, when he allows himself to do so, that they would let him sit in his chair for the IV feedings, even if they didn’t let him sit there just to sit. The other support teams at the other bases let him. It’s his chair, after all. In the other bases, it’s where he belongs when he’s not specifically ordered to be somewhere else, doing something else. It’s a very comfortable chair, when the restraints are harmlessly open and the halo is raised up high and silent. It’s relaxing. Safe. Way better than the cryochamber and the cold, and with an excellent view of the garland that he both hates and adores in equal, alternating measures.

It’s not as though the chair is the only point in the pit to observe that garland from, though. He can still see the garland from inside the cryochamber, for instance. Can look out from the smudgy glass wall during testing and make out the faint green splodges of the garland just at the top of his field of vision, just for a moment before the cold _really_ hits him and everything is a muffled, silent oblivion.

From what he can put together of the last few weeks—he thinks it’s only been few weeks—the support team in this base has been tasked with improving the cryofreeze process. Their improvements so far seem to consist of adding and subtracting aerosolized chemicals, jamming a breathing tube down his throat, and increasing the number of Tesseract-blue monitoring devices studding the cryosuit he has to wear at all times—because it would just be so damn inconvenient if they had to change his outfit before tossing him in the fucking freezer.

He’s not been enjoying it, which is hardly a _discovery_ in any sense of that word. His lack of enthusiasm is not something the support team gives a flying fuck about, which is _also_ not a discovery. He hates this base and this support team, and no amount of garland is going to fix that. He’s been frozen more times in the last however long than in the whole prior year… he thinks. It’s hard to be certain. His memory is shit at the best of times, and the cold-thaw-cold-thaw-cold doesn’t help things. It’s hard to keep track of anything when he’s in and out of the cold so often.

The garland is a constant, though. It jogs his memory whenever he comes back out of the cold, fills him in on the current sitrep—which base (fuck, the Kursk base), which team (the goddamn HYDRA team), what they’re putting him through this time (so fucking cold), what’s expected of him in return (…he tends to draw a blank on this; there’s only so much the garland can help with—it’s just garland, after all, for all that he has an arrangement with some of the garland’s inhabitants).

Mostly, what seems to be expected of him in this base is that he stays in the pit unless they direct him to the training course, where he will run endurance tests until he passes out from a variety of cryofreeze-related causes. Or unless they direct him to the medical room, where he’ll lie back on the table and be as still as he can be while they perform whatever repairs are needed after failing the endurance trials and before they can stuff him back in the fucking cryochamber.

For everything else, the pit suffices.

There’s his chair and the halo, so that they can erase memories he shouldn’t have, and put new thoughts in his head that they want him to have, and lock up his limbs for any Arm repairs. Check. There’s a table where any mission briefings will be presented to him if they ever send him on another mission, which is starting to seem like never again, but still, it’s a check.

There’s the cryochamber, source of his current misery. Double fucking check.

There’s the tile-lined niche in the wall, with the hoses for cleaning him and the chains for punishing him. Check. There’s the other little niche with the bench behind the barred door, where they feed him through the IVs and where they want him to stay whenever they are upstairs doing the things people do, which seems to increasingly consist of singing and passing around little gifts and bottles of vodka. Check, check, check.

He spends most of his time, at least most of the time he’s aware of his surroundings, behind the barred door. If the support team in this base is uncomfortable with his chair, they’re even more uncomfortable with the thought of him moving around freely inside the pit, especially at night. As though his moving around in the pit was going to undo their work. As if he would sabotage their progress. As if he would hurt himself. That last is frankly ridiculous. He’s long since given up on suicide. It doesn’t work. The General showed him, very, _very_ explicitly, and for a very, _very_ long time, that it did not work.

He learned.

The General is a very patient, thorough instructor. The General knows how to get through to him, how to inspire him, how to keep him at peak performance even through a monthlong sabbatical from missions.

The General would not quarantine him to a little indentation in the wall of the pit. This support team, though, they want him to stay here. _Exactly here_. They want him to lie down on the metal bench and be still until they are ready to send him back into the cold, followed by the training course and the medical table and the chair, and then back to the bench behind the bars. They do not want him to _sleep_ on the bench, and so he doesn’t. But they do expect to come down into the pit and find him exactly where they left him.

They haven’t _told_ him so—he thinks he’d remember if they did; he’s good at remembering direct orders, or at least _better_ at remembering them. He’s close to certain they _haven’t_ commanded him to stay in the corner, or even in the pit itself, but he’s just as sure they want him to. And an unspoken order is still something to comply with, technically. It’s still something he can be punished for _not_ complying with, which, when you boil it down, is reason enough to go ahead and try to comply. Somewhat.

Staying behind the bars in the little indentation with the bench doesn’t actually hinder his view of the garland, anyway. He can look out between the bars, even while curled up beneath the bench (less exposed that way, and the hint of defiance in the action tastes good to him), and catch the swoops of color that do not belong alongside the concrete and metal and fluorescent lights, and that he sometimes loves, and sometimes hates _a lot_.

The garland is distracting. Even if this support team had assigned him mental conditioning challenges to take up the long stretches of downtime, the garland would still pull at him. It keeps jumping into his mind, crowding up toward the front, every time his eyes come across it, even if it’s just as a flicker of green in the corner of his sight. And it’s practically unavoidable—a splash of color where there _should not be_ color.

And there are glittering _things_ tucked away in the garland, sometimes in a cluster (like the support team, always moving about the base in twos and threes and fours) and sometimes all on their own (like him). Some of the things are balls, either made of metal or painted in metallic colors. He’s not permitted close enough to be certain. Some of the things are little birds. Red ones, gold ones, silver ones… Some of the things are ribbons, red satin. He doesn’t know for sure that they are satin. But something in his mind suggests it—either satin or velvet—and he has no reason to suppose otherwise.

Eventually, he gives up trying to ignore the garland. It’s everywhere, after all. If they didn’t want him looking at it, they wouldn’t hang it up. Unless it’s a test. All of the support teams at all of the bases, even the ones that haven’t been infiltrated by HYDRA yet, are sadistically fond of such tests. And he fails a _lot_ of them. But if it’s a test and he’s failing it, no one has yet chastised him for the failure.

Once, in a reckless attempt to discover whether it is a test, he looks directly, almost defiantly, at the garland when he’s been given nothing more practical to direct his attention toward. No one even glances in his direction. He feels… maybe a little lightheaded, maybe a little… “Stir crazy” is what one of the support team had called it, when the outlook for the future is boredom with a side of boredom. Something about fevers and cabins that had not made sense then and still doesn’t, exactly, except that it’s supposed to be a description of the same feeling.

He needs a mission so bad.

It’s not even that he looks forward to killing anyone. He doesn’t. He’d rather _not_ , if given a choice. But he’s got to do _something_. Something besides sit on this fucking bench and wait for the support team to… he doesn’t know. Go through the routine again, maybe. Cold-thaw, cold-thaw. They should just leave him in the cold if they aren’t going to get on with it.

Seriously—not even a fucking logic puzzle to worry at while they run their calculations and mutter about chemical formulas and muscle strain and tissue regeneration. Not even a goddamn rifle to take apart and clean and reassemble on loop for hours. Not even the training course for endless unsupervised laps. It serves them right if he loses his mind in the fronds of garland all day long. What else do they expect? Fucking HYDRA. The General knows better. The General keeps his mind sharp and ready to comply.

The General is not here.

He decides one day, after a perfunctory wipe that merely smooths things over, and does not make the last few weeks go away, that the birds are the most interesting of the objects tucked into the greenery. They nest in the garland and shine and glitter in the flickering, buzzing fluorescent lights. Not at all like real birds, though he can’t quite recall when he last had an opportunity to stare incessantly at any actual, non-garland-haunting birds. He wants…

—No. He _doesn’t_ want. Has learned not to want. Wanting is a human thing, a thing he has forgotten, a thing the General has helped him to forget, allowed him to forget…

But he _is_ curious, increasingly driven to touch them. Just once. Just to run a finger along one of the birds’ heads. Just to see what they feel like, what they’re made of. Are they smooth, like the fingertips on his metal hand? Are they rough, like the calluses on his flesh hand?

He could go up the stairs to be closer to the garland with the birds. There’s no barricade in place to stop him at the moment. And since they’re all so bizarrely afraid of his chair, they don’t strap him down to it at night, like some of the other bases’ support teams do. He’s physically free to move about the pit, and also outside of it.

It’s just that the upper levels are for personnel, for the support team, for base staff, for officers and their occasionally visiting families. For the arborists who manage the forested area around the base so that it remains undetected, and the structural engineers who ensure that the base will remain as upright as a base drilled deep into the earth can be said to be.

The upper levels are not for him. He belongs down here in the pit, not up there near the garland with the birds. Even more, he belongs in one specific part of the pit, behind the bars, even though the barred door isn’t locked to keep him in—and wouldn’t keep him in if it were welded shut, simply because the Arm is much stronger than a few piddly bars.

Even without going up the stairs where he doesn’t belong, though, he could get a closer look at the birds through a rifle scope. The armory is down the hall just through the door directly across from the cryochamber, and he’s never been denied access to an armory that he can remember, at least at other bases. Other support teams have only ever encouraged him to frolic in the ordinance, to repetitively assemble and disassemble every piece of every item, to learn the other weapons as inside and out as he knows himself. Better than, actually. They don’t want him knowing much about the Arm.

But he can imagine the panic that would descend upon this base if anyone looked down and saw him looking back from the pit through a rifle scope, even if he didn’t still have it attached to its rifle. His job is to kill the people he’s directed to kill, not to terrify the people who own him.

There is a very small part of him that thinks it would be hilarious and fitting for every HYDRA fucker on this base to shit themselves in a blind panic over something as simple as him getting a good look at one of those fucking, _fucking_ garland birds that torment him by sparkling so brightly. All the other parts of him scream and gibber about the repercussions of that, the cognitive recalibration they would put him through, the behavioral modification, the maintenance to repair his programming, which would have to have fallen apart for him to do that…

…The General’s severe disappointment with him…

He licks his suddenly dry lips. No. The rifle scope is not an option. He will do nothing that could draw the General’s disappointment.

And so he spends endless empty minutes each day between trips into and out of the cold, when none of the support team are paying him any attention beyond lamenting the state of his throat, looking at the garland two and more stories above him, with the metallic spheres, the glittering birds, the satin—velvet?—bows. And he spends long, silent hours each night, when none of the support team are even awake, lying under the metal bench behind the bars, thinking about what it would be like to touch one of the birds. His fingers itch with it, metal and flesh both, the thought of touching a glittering bird…

He wonders if he fell off this same train of thought the last time he was stored in this base over the winter—seven years ago, if he’s overheard the chatter correctly. To him, the garland is new; the metal balls, new; the birds, new. He thinks the ribbons—satin? velvet?—might be familiar, may be repurposed from something else, could be not-new. He doesn’t remember seeing them before, but they have that look about them. Who is he to say whether they are new or not-new? He doesn’t pretend to be the best judge of whether something has happened before.

He supposes, after another week of sleepless contemplation while the support team fine-tunes their latest improvement to the cryofreeze process, that he _could_ touch one of the birds, after all, and fuck it if the support team panics.

He knows that he’s supposed to stay in the pit, that the little barred nook with the bench is where he belongs overnight in this base, staring into the darkness and listening to all the little night sounds and waiting for his throat to heal, or for them to take him out and send him through the training course, or strap him to the table, or put him into the cold again, or maybe (hopefully) prep him for a mission.

He should stay in the pit… _But no one specifically directed him to do that._ There were no orders. No one gave the command, no one called him by his designation and laid down the directive and asked him if he would comply. He would remember. He’s _sure_ he would remember. He _knows_ he would remember.

So he wouldn’t be breaking any rules if he were to climb up in the night and touch one of the glittering birds. _A red one_ , he thinks, as his empty stomach flutters like he’s disobeying a direct order from the General himself, even though he’s doing no such thing. _I would touch one of the red birds._

He closes his eyes and trembles with the sudden wash of fear and anticipation as he imagines climbing the stairs, walking up them almost like a person might, and reaching out…

Which hand? Which hand would he use to touch the bird? The metal hand would tell him so much about the bird. The precise temperature, whether there was an electrical component, maybe even the composition, the materials used to create the bird. And it would leave no evidence behind. But the flesh hand… To touch a glittering bird with the flesh hand, to run a flesh finger along the bird’s head, to rest a flesh fingertip at the point of its beak and feel how sharp…

He opens his eyes with a gasp, controls his shaky breathing, swallows against the ache in his throat. It’s night. It’s unlikely anyone from the support team would be watching him. They’re all asleep. He’s in the cryosuit, of course he is, but there are no monitors tucked inside it, nothing resting against his skin or inside his skull to alert them to his agitation.

But it is important to maintain baseline functioning when possible. It would be unpleasant if they noticed his elevated heart rate, investigated, asked him what was on his mind… and then took the thoughts of the glittering birds away from him. They’d use the halo, because that’s what they’re equipped with. A general wipe, precursory, maintenance only. Nothing specific, nothing deep. But at this point, the fucking birds might as well be the only thoughts he has left. They’d _have_ to go deep to get the birds out. And deep means…

It means…

 _No._ No. _Avoid that thought. Move on._

Better to return himself to baseline than be returned to it by the— By the— By—

He doesn’t think about the excavation team, or the gaping, jagged, empty places inside himself, or the special machines, unspeakably worse than the halo, that are used to carve those empty places out. Not in any specific sense; at the best of times, his mind shies away from them like a record skipping over to a new track whenever he gets too close to those thoughts.

Other times, he’s like a stone on top of a lake, thrown just right, scraping the surface of that emptiness and the men and women who carve it out, skipping over the top until _plunk_ , down he sinks into it and loses time, sometimes whole days, before someone comes and lifts him back out.

 _They_ are not housed in this base, he knows. Not the… the team. Not their machines. And he is safe here, as long as no one suspects there’s a need for anything more thorough than the halo.

But he could be transferred.

Or _they_ could be transferred.

Could come and— and—

Skip.

Skip skip skip.

 _Plunk_.


	2. Chapter 2

“— _really_ think it’ll work this time, Sergei.”

Footsteps on the stairs above. Coming down into the prep room. Bars in front of him, his cheek on the cement floor. He usually rests with his flesh arm under his cheek. What happened? Doesn’t matter. There’s company. Excited, hopeful, energetic…  

…and still speaking: “We’ve gotten good results in the simulations, and if we don’t have the right mix by now, I don’t think there is one.”

He takes a quick mental assessment of his baseline—within the proper range, good, no one will know about… whatever it is that stole an entire night from his personal, gap-studded timeline. Part of him hates that, losing time. The rest of him wishes he could gather up all of his remaining time and lose every minute of it. There is something to be said for the pleasant nature of oblivion. If only they wouldn’t thaw him out.

A sigh, and less enthusiastic stomp-shuffling on the stairs. “I just want to be done with this already.”

Grumpy company, like they have any reason to be grumpy, living right next to the the beautiful, glittering garland-birds. _That’s right. This is the base with the garland and the boredom. Fucking overrun by HYDRA._ He wonders if the General knows that. He’s got to. The General knows pretty much everything.

Still, Kursk base, HYDRA, it’s going to be the cold again. Maybe he’ll try biting them this time when they come at him with the air tube. Only two of the support team are working on him today, based on the sounds on the stairs. They’re getting complacent. He can get a good chomp in before they retaliate. Might be worth it, if he can keep himself from zoning out long enough to do it. Decisions, decisions.

Grumpy continues, “Is it too much to ask that I spend a few days with my son this month, without having to deal with this? It’s his first Christmas, for crying out loud. I wanted to travel, see family. Wish I’d never been stationed here.”

_You and me, both, pal._

“Wait, where is—?” Hopeful pauses at the base of the steps, well outside the ring of metal safety bars that surround the chair. Hopeful is a fucking HYDRA coward. That chair does not bite; it _cradles_. It’s the halo that bites, and bites hard, though not… not deep. “Oh, he’s under the goddamn bench again.”

“Tch! I swear, if that bastard is fucking sleeping, I’ll…”

He is _not_ fucking sleeping, _thank you_ , but now he has a limited amount of time to prove it before he catches a cattle prod to his sternum for the imagined infraction. He slithers out from under the metal bench as he sits up. If he’s going to get shocked, it’ll be for something he’s actually done.

The birds in the garland chirp silent “good morning, Soldier” greetings to him. He replies, just as silently, “I am ready to comply.”

He doesn’t remember when he and the birds decided to privately engage in the official call-and-response in the absence of a handler delivering a mission, but it’s comforting. Even if he knows on every single level that it is delusional on his part. If the support team won’t _support_ him, won’t give him anything at all to latch onto, won’t even allow him the comfort of his chair, well, of course he’s going to get a little delusional. They are seriously falling down on the job when it comes to proper maintenance. Fucking HYDRA.

The General would never let him deteriorate to this extent. The General knows how to take care of his possessions.

And he is aware that he is among the most highly prized of those possessions. It’s one of the only things he has left to feel good about.

He ignores Grumpy’s grumbling about where he chooses to spend his nights—honestly, what’s it to him if the marginally more secure space under the bench is more appealing than the entirely vulnerable space above it—and focuses instead on Hopeful’s chatter about progress and gaseous temperature fluctuation with relation to humidity. It’s not more interesting, exactly, but it’s a lot more earnest. If Hopeful wasn’t HYDRA and intent on shoving a tube down his throat and freezing him solid around said tube, he might actually like the kid. He likes earnest people, when he forgets that he’s not supposed to like things.

He listens to them clatter about with the coils of wire and canisters of aerosolized chemicals and watches the birds in the garland while he waits. There’s the hiss of the cryochamber opening. Why they bother to pressurize the thing when he’s not in it is a mystery he doesn’t care enough to ponder. He did care, once, earlier. But then he asked someone about it, and that was apparently a mistake, and after the correction of his mistake by means of being chained to the tiles and strafed with high-pressure water that stripped off a wide band of skin along his torso, he gave that piece of curiosity over to the emptiness and hasn’t seen it since.

He no longer dares to actively wonder about any part of this process other than “when will it fucking end?” And even that, he knows better than to ask about. “HYDRA takes no prisoners,” they say. What they _should_ say, but do not, is, “HYDRA does not tolerate questions.” As far as mottos go, HYDRA doesn’t put much value on accuracy, except the one about order and pain. That one he’s found to be very accurate.

He lets them walk him to the cryochamber when they’re set up for him, lets them pull and push, direct him silently—stand, walk, turn, step back, stay put. It’s easier than putting up a fight, easier than a cattle prod across the face, easier than a full support team complete with rifle-toting enforcers. And it will make it much easier to bite the shit out of either Hopeful or Grumpy, whichever one draws the short straw and has to come at his face with that air tube. He’s made that decision. He’s bored out of his admittedly damaged mind, and he liked the cryofreeze process a lot better when it didn’t involve gagging and choking _not_ -to-death on a tube before the cold hit him.

They’re talking as they strap him in place, buckling thick bands of cold-tolerant synthetic materials at biceps, forearms, thighs, ankles. He appreciates that, the sense of stability that comes from being securely tethered. He’s essentially a nonsentient slab of cybernetically enhanced ice once the cold hits, but he has several flashes of memory where he’s falling, so he must have actually fallen at least once in his life, and badly enough that it sticks with him. He thinks it would be fucking awful to shatter on the concrete if he toppled over while frozen.

“—great if this lasts. I love it when he goes catatonic like this.” That’s Hopeful speaking. No, Grumpy. Hopeful? Damn, he’s forgotten which was which. Consternation.

“You know it won’t, though.” _That’s_ Grumpy. Definitely. He’s got them straight again. Relief.

“But he’s so easy to work with like this.” Hopeful hums something as he threads another of the Tesseract-blue monitoring nodes into the cryosuit. It’s catchy. Upbeat. Cheerful. Some small, internal part of him sneers. Obviously _foreign_. “Just a breeze, you know? Maybe when we’re done with this upgrade, we can work on something to keep him like this all the time.”

Keep him like what? Compliantly waiting for the right moment to bite someone? This support team is staffed with morons. Sadistic morons, sure, but so stupid. The General would have read his intentions the moment it was necessary to physically pull him to his feet. Granted, he would never bite the General, or even bite anyone else if the General was present. But robotic compliance? Has never ended without a well-timed struggle. At least not that he remembers. Which, actually, doesn’t say much. But still. Morons.

He flicks his gaze to the right, toward Grumpy, who scowls at him. What the hell is _his_ problem? He gets to spend the whole fucking day ambulatory and warmer than room temperature. He doesn’t even know he’s minutes away from maybe losing a finger, so he’s got no excuse for the attitude. Jackass.

“You gonna cooperate this time, Soldier?” Grumpy holds up the mask with its tube. “Give us a little gift for the holidays?”

He grits his teeth, glares. They will win. He knows this. They will get his mouth open, and they will put that tube down his throat. He can’t stop them. But he doesn’t have to make it easy. They won’t use the cattle prod on him in the cryochamber. It would damage the equipment far worse than it would damage him. They can’t take the risk. And they’ll never get around to shocking him afterward. Too much other stuff going on. The only effective struggle he has available that doesn’t end worse for him than is worthwhile is waiting until he’s surrounded by delicate instruments, and if these idiots were any smarter, they’d see it coming.

“Goddamnit,” Grumpy mutters. “I fucking hate this job so much.” He turns to where Hopeful is fiddling with the calibration. “Hand me the fucking tranqs. We’re doing it the hard way.” Grumpy is not gentle when he jabs him with the needle. None of them are, really. They’re HYDRA. HYDRA doesn’t do gentle. Though to be fair, neither does anyone else who works on him. He supposes he doesn’t inspire “gentle” from the endless procession of techs, what with his occasional violent outbursts and behavioral glitches. He _knows_ he does nothing to earn it from them.

His little jaw-clamping protest doesn’t last much longer than it takes for the syringe of mystery drugs to empty out into his bloodstream, and he is grateful once again for the thick straps holding him upright as the pit and everything in it slips sideways out from under his feet in a wash of vertigo. He hates falling.

The support team’s voices come from far away, and he only catches a smattering of their words between his efforts to turn his head away from the hand grabbing his jaw—

“…still being like this…”

—the scrabbling of fingers at his lips and along his gums, trying to pry his teeth apart—

—and now is good, the timing’s right—

—the crunch, blood across his tongue, Grumpy’s shriek—

“Fucking bit me!”

“Just stick him again, Sergei. He can take another dose, he’s like a fucking rhino.”

“There's _bone!_ I can see _bone!_ He bit through—”

“Crap. Here, let me…”

—then more slipping, more falling, more of his weight hanging from the restraints as his legs give out entirely.

And he’s choking, gagging at rough pressure scratching at his throat, the friction tracing fire down like the— Like when—

Hurts. Clears throat—can’t. Swallows— _can’t_. It’s in the way, flooding his lungs with not-air, bitter, hurts, can’t breathe, can’t swallow, can’t see, panic-panic- _panic_ —

“—reached full lung saturation, I’m gonna drop the glass.”

The glass comes down, and the hiss of the gas flooding the cryochamber breaks through the incoherent screaming in his head, for just a brief moment, before everything is lost in the stabbing, brittle cold, a million flash-frozen flesh shards inside himself, piercing everywhere, through everything, from the outside in, from the inside out, scraping against bone, against metal so cold it burns, everything jagged, everything sharp, everything pain, and pain, and pain, and…

He doesn’t dream. At least, not the way people dream. He’s not people. He knows that. Not even HYDRA would stick a _person_ in the cold like this. …Right? He thinks that’s right. Give them _some_ credit. Maybe. Though they haven’t earned it.

He doesn’t dream, but he does imagine the red bird for what feels like hours, what could be an entire night, if he was curled up under the bench behind the bars, and not strapped upright in the cold with his pain and the solid rod of ice choking him so that he can’t even scream.

The bird is a comfort, and he latches onto it, even goes so far as to imagine himself moving, shifting trapped, paralyzed limbs to climb out of the cryochamber, up out of the pit, up the stairs… to pluck the bird from the garland, like it was a juicy piece of fruit and not a glittering object made from unknown materials. Tries to imagine what a juicy piece of fruit would even be like, since he can’t recall ever having any such thing. He’s seen people eat fruit, though. He can build off of that.

He can’t breathe, but he can’t suffocate, either. This might be hell.

In between getting his mind stuck on the burning crackle and shattering-reforming ice crystals lodged deeply in every part of him, and panicking all over again about the obstruction in his throat that sends coherent thoughts scattering like roaches in the light, he imagines holding a little red bird in his flesh hand, feeling the weight of it, cradling it against his chest, stroking his flesh thumb along its back. Feeling… whatever it feels like, to hold something so fragile and beautiful and forbidden.

Sometimes, he knows that he is strapped upright in the cold, with the harsh yellow lights above and the smudge of green through the glass. _The garland_. There are the blurred figures crossing back and forth in front of him, technicians checking gauges, reading the output from the monitoring devices tucked into the cryosuit, sometimes just seeming to look up at him.

Other times, he knows that he is strapped down onto a table in a darkened room with echoing footsteps outside the door. There is a man with glasses— _that_ man, with _those_ glasses—looking down at him. Behind the glasses are eyes. Huge, huge eyes. He sees every lash, every little fold in the lids, every twitching fluctuation of the pupils. There is a bow tie. Like the bows in the garland.

Whether he can see everything in too-sharp detail or sees nothing but smudges and impressions of movement, whether he’s upright or on his back, whether it’s several men or one man, whether there are needles in his veins or ice in his throat, whether he can hear someone coming for him—who would come for him? why? this is where he’s supposed to be—or nothing but the muffled silence of the cold… everything hurts.

Everything hurts, and the birds are not really there. That much he knows.

Knowing the birds are not there does nothing to remove them from his thoughts. He wonders if the gold birds and the silver birds feel neglected by his obsession with the red birds. Because he knows that he’s obsessed. That’s the word for it. Obsessed. Troublingly, constantly, intrusively preoccupied. Even here in the cold, plagued by not-dream thoughts and hallucinations, he is, without a doubt, obsessed. That word applies to him.

It shouldn’t.

Not right now. Not in the cold. Nothing should apply to him in the cold. He… doesn’t exist, in the cold. He _isn’t_ , in the cold. That’s the point, or— He had thought that was the point. That he would go away, be put out of sight, out of mind, be left in the cold until the General needed him again. That he would sink into the empty places and feast on oblivion until he had to _be_ again.

But he is obsessed, even in the cold. And he is thinking, even in the cold. Thinking thoughts. In the cold. That shouldn’t happen.

He doesn’t think he’s ever had a thought in the cold before this latest round. And now he is having them. It used to be a flash of pain- _cold_ , and then oblivion. Now it is eternal pain-cold and _awareness_. It occurs to him that this might be the development they were working on. This might be what happens when it _works_.

That… strikes him as being incredibly unfair. Also terrifying. But mostly unfair.


	3. Chapter 3

It has been three hours since they put him in the cold.

It has been three years.

It has been three days.

He really could not say which of those is accurate, and not only because he cannot speak around the unyielding ice blocking his throat. He doesn’t know how much time has passed, and isn’t entirely certain whether he’s on a table in a lab or in a tube in a basement or even actually in an iced over hell.

He’s thinking—cannot stop thinking—and all of his thoughts are recycled, are old, are not-new. He’s thought them all one hundred times, and he hates them, and the birds agree. They are getting tired of his thoughts, too, and have told him so.

And he _is_ tired of them, his thoughts. He shouldn’t be having them, not in the cold. And whether he’s on a table, or in a tube, or in hell, it is absolutely cold. That is the one, incontrovertible fact of his existence: that it is cold, that he is cold, that there is only the cold.

Hell is cold. He read that somewhere. Or it was told to him. Hell is cold, and circular, with rings. Lots of them, all of them colder and more miserable the deeper you went. Nine of them, he thinks. Nine circles. Rings? Levels? There’s a lot of hell, someone told him him, and it gets colder the deeper you go. He thinks he is really deep.

There are no birds in hell, but there aren’t any birds in here with him, either, for all his brain makes them up, imagines them, invites them to join in his delusions. So that doesn’t rule hell out.

What might rule hell out is the movement in front of him, the shifting of the translucent glass itself, rather than the figures beyond it. The garland.

It certainly rules out the table and _that_ man with _those_ glasses. And that, in turn, rules out the unknown person who is coming for unknown reasons to get him off of the table. Because if he is not on the table, there is nothing to bring him back from.

The hissing he knows he hears is muffled, because it always is from the inside of the cryochamber. There is nothing but quiet inside, quiet and cold and pain. Until everything thaws out. Then it’s rushes of noise, everything too loud and too bright, everything still hurting, hurting worse, until the cold has bled out fully.

That’s what this is, now. The heat across his skin as the chamber’s gas rushes out and is replaced by the humid, hot air outside—painful, not a relief from the cold but just a different flavor of burning. The flash of fire along the lines of the cryosuit, agony carving zig-zag lines along his legs and torso. It’s designed to speed the thawing process, he knows, but he’s never been so aware of it before, aware of it personally, in the moment, as anything but an overheard academic discussion.

Firsthand, being aware of it as it happens, is much worse than simply knowing it as an externally experienced fact of the process.

He still can’t move, even to blink, but without the glass in the way, he can see the support team milling about the pit, some checking vital signs, some monitoring the equipment, some waving and gesturing toward enforcers with rifles—and what is the point of that? what do they think he can do to them right now?—some reaching up and unfastening the mask from over his face.

His throat tugs at the tube they try to drag out of him, his frozen flesh clinging to the tube, grabbing for it, and finally tearing loose, not from the tube, but from the rest of him. The tube comes out, with its strips of ripped, partly frozen meat stuck to it, and what’s left of his throat tries to swallow, tries to gag, tries to cough—can’t manage any of that, still paralyzed as he is.

“Careful!”

He knows that voice. Would know it anywhere. Who…?

“It’ll heal. It’s not like we need him singing arias between assassinations, sir.”

“I want him in sound physical condition on retrieval.” Disapproving, even hostile. He _knows_ that voice. “Every. Single. Time.” Banging sound, punctuating the words. Hand slapping tabletop? “Find a way to make that happen.”

“We— We’ll need to redesign—”

“I don’t care.” So familiar. It’ll come to him. It always does. Just takes a while after the cold.

The cryosuit burns. It’s flames spun into fabric and welded to his skin, and the fire flicks along his torso, his legs, leaving ten thousand stinging wasps in its wake, the crawling march of seven million biting ants, so much sensation his brain struggles to catch up, keep up.

“Redesign whatever you have to. This is our only supersoldier. I won’t have him broken by a pack of over-eager scientists catering to a lazy containment team.”

“Sir—”

“General—”

“He’s all we have, and he’s got to last. That supersoldier is an asset worth more than all of you combined. Remember that when you design your next improvement.”

Then the sensations are familiar again, just the hot prickle of sleeping everything coming out of hibernation. Blood pounding in his ears like so much frigid river water under its thin shell of ice and snow. Lungs expanding under his ribs, creaking and grinding like a calving glacier. The typical spring following the winter, leaving behind all the sluggish muddy thinking that entails. Nothing unusual, nothing worse than usual, nothing he doesn’t expect.

“Of course, sir. The process can be improved, as we promised. We’re sure of that. It should be possible to even—”

“Tinker with it later. I want him prepped to run a mission this afternoon.”

“But that’s—”

“We have to run tests, General. Put him through the course, see where the point of failure is this time. We can’t just—”

“You’re _expecting_ failure? After a mere…” Shuffling of paper. Checking of data points, maybe. Hard to say. “…a mere week in cryostasis, you’re _anticipating_ failure when you pull him out. Planning for it, or planning it?”

Dangerous tone of voice, accusation, but directed not-at-him. His relief is about as palpable as the twisting knot of misery trailing down from his throat to the middle of his chest.

“It’s just—”

“Based purely on prior data points, General.” This one’s voice sounds sweaty, terrified. Good. Serves him right. “Nothing intentional. Nothing—”

“We wouldn’t sabotage the project, sir.”

Tiny pinpricks of blood gather along the insides of his throat, blood welling up from the tattered broken bits of him, coalescing into rivulets that he can either choke on or cough up, now that he is thawing out, can move, has at least a little control over himself. It’s a different kind of fire, clearing his throat wetly, gathering up both the wet new blood and the hardened old, but he doesn’t have enough control to cough yet, so it’ll do. He shouldn’t cough, anyway. None of the support teams on any of the bases appreciate unnecessary sounds.

He moves his tongue, swallows the blood back into his throat, but not down into his lungs where it had been heading. He’d spit it at them, at the support team—garland means Kursk, means HYDRA, means they’ll be wearing his blood soon anyway, and he might as well get a jump on that—but…

It would be a mess that can be avoided. The General frowns on messes that can be avoided. But the General isn’t… Is the General here? It occurs to him with a white-hot flash of joy and shame that the General _is_ here. That’s the voice. _His_ voice. The voice that matters the most and that he should have known at the first syllable. The voice that is angry, but not-at-him, is frustrated, but not-with-him. Even fresh out of cryofreeze, it’s inexcusable that he didn’t know the General’s voice as belonging to the General.

He swallows again, grimaces as a fresh scab pulls loose, bites back a whimper as the support team bustles about, unfastening straps and holding him upright until he’s loose and they can drag his soggy, boneless body out of the cryochamber and across the pit to the bench behind the bars.

“Good morning, Soldier,” chirp the garland birds in his mind.

“Fuck off, garland birds,” he mumbles internally. He is not ready to comply. He is not ready for anything. He can’t even lift his head up. Why are they making demands like that. Why are they… He reminds himself that they aren’t real. Or that they _are_ —they’re very real, they’re there, he sees them—but that they aren’t really chirping to him. They are garland birds, not real birds. They don’t know better than to ask for his compliance before he’s regained half as many gross motor skills as a baby. Poor, stupid garland birds.

Anyway, the General is here. There is no room for garland bullshit when the General is here.

There is only room for getting dumped on the bench and rehydrated, and for boots pulled onto his feet, and the training course, and trying not to fail for the General, working harder than he would for just the support team. Because fuck them, anyway, but he won’t let the General down.

“He belongs in the chair, gentlemen.”

Yes. Yes, he does. The General knows.

“Well, he would, sir. But he doesn’t get wiped until after the—”

“I’m not here to observe your testing. I’m here to collect my Soldier for an operation in Moscow.”

“Er. And then back here?”

They may be asking the question—impertinent little assholes—but they seem to know better than to act against the General’s wishes, because he’s not deposited on the bench, but in his chair. Fucking finally. This has the added bonus of propping his head up, so he can actually look at the General instead of just listening to his voice. The General looks good. Healthy. That’s reassuring. There are more stars on his uniform than before. He thinks there are, anyway. He has nothing to fact check that against, though, so he simply mentally updates his visuals on the General. Three stars. He can remember that.

“Back here, yes.”

The hostility is still there, easily read from his face, even for the HYDRA morons staffing this base. Surely they can see it, even if they haven’t heard it. The General doesn’t want him here. Why not. And if not, then why is he here. The General is the head of the project, the founder of the whole idea. His decisions are the final decisions.

He spends several outwardly blank minutes trying to parse that, trying to see if he can ferret out any connections between his woefully spotty recollections and the possibility of someone usurping the General while he’s been deployed as a sometime-field agent and sometime-lab rat. Nothing jumps to mind, and the support team has seemed to be dedicated enough to “improvements,” even if he has several objections to what those improvements might entail, based on the last (apparently) weeklong trip to the freezer.

There are more stars. How would anyone take power from the General while he gets more stars? That’s… not how it works. He’s sure that’s not how it works. More stars, higher rank, more power.

Stars or not, the General still has the authority necessary to pull him out of the research base in Kursk, at a moment’s notice, and send him to… he thinks back a few minutes… Moscow. To kill someone, probably; he’ll find out the details later. The General called him “my Soldier,” which probably doesn’t have any bearing on the General’s position within the project, but does make him, the Soldier in question, very happy. Deep down inside where no one will see it and take it away from him.

In the end, he gives up. The General outranks everyone at this base, and he doesn’t remember anything that would constitute a legitimate challenge to the General’s iron grip on the project reins. Even if HYDRA is a slowly creeping infection in both the Winter Soldier project and the KGB as a whole, the General has an eye on it. He… wouldn’t let it get too far.

That might be the entire reason for the hostility, anyway. Not the research, not the improvements, but the fact that this is the base that was equipped to put those improvements into play and was also, unfortunately, a slithering nest of HYDRA asshats. He would sympathize on that note, but that would be presumptuous on his part. The General does not need his sympathy; the General needs his skillset and the soulless lack of personhood that enables him to put that skillset to use on command and without protest or remorse.

And that is something he can do now. The fluids help, and whatever else they have in the bags on the poles. He can swallow the blood without showing his pain now, and there’s less and less blood every minute. Still plenty of pain. That doesn’t go away so much as get forgotten about after a while. He’s ready to comply, if anyone cares to ask about that. The garland birds, maybe, even though he was rude to them earlier. He feels like they don’t hold it against him, but they still don’t have anything to say.

Pressure on his chin. The General’s fingers. His attention snaps back to his surroundings. “Open.”

“Careful, sir, he—”

“—gets bitey sometimes. Sergei’s gonna lose that finger.”

“Crunched right through the bone.”

He ignores their chatter and opens his mouth. As if he would bite the General. Nonsense.

The General ignores their chatter, too, and instead meets his eyes and shares a Look with him. It’s a delightful Look. It says, “Good job, Soldier,” and, “Bite them again, if you have the opportunity,” and, “Fuck HYDRA.” But it also says, “Don’t pull that bullshit on my watch,” and, “I will have you flogged until you are a pile of broken bones and tiny fleshy scraps if you make me look bad.” He believes the General. The General does not lie to him. He does not want to be a pile of broken bones and tiny fleshy scraps, even if he would probably survive that.

What the General says with his mouth, after accepting the penlight from one of the support team, is, “The tracheal damage is concerning. Find a way around that. I won’t have my Soldier’s throat in tatters every time we pull him out of storage. He needs to be able to reply to commands and ask for clarification.”

As usual, the response is excitable, overlapping chatter and science babble.

“He can. Um, in about twenty more minutes. He’s—”

“—regeneration rate is remarkable, especially given the typical effects of colder temperatures on living tiss—”

“—able to breathe normally within just fifteen minutes of glass-up, though there is marked respiratory distress when running the course, and—”

The General cuts them both off with a gesture. “Just get him ready.” He knocks a knuckle against the arm of the halo closest to himself. “I’ll read your reports if I want the specifics, without all the babbling.”

“Yes, sir.”

There’s the hustle and bustle of the halo techs setting the calibration, the click-click of the restraints flipping closed—and his corresponding nervous twitch, which he never has managed to bury—the eager murmurs of scientific inquiry only half heard as he accepts the mouth guard, the rubber and blood fighting over which will be the stronger taste.

“…n’t wiped him right after the new procedures before. If my hypothesis…”

“…just a surface level wipe, I think…”

“…mission prep, though, should be standard if we’re sending him solo…”

“… still think my theory…”

He looks up at the garland as he mouths at the rubber, settling it just right between his teeth. Finds one of the glittering red birds.

He was… waiting for a mission, earlier. Not wanting one; he doesn’t want things. But needing something constructive to do. If deconstructing a target can be called a constructive task. He thinks it probably can be. Any task the General sets him is a constructive one.

And now he has one, or will, shortly. That’s… good. He swallows down a bit of blood and a lot of anxiety that has no place here. It’s good. He should be useful. It’s good to be useful. But…

The bird on the third railing is so small, and so delicate, and so shiny, and so red. He wishes it could distract him, but the halo is moving now, and he remembers suddenly that he emphatically does not want that. Doesn’t want the halo, doesn’t want what it does, doesn’t want, doesn’t…

No-no-no, he wants to _remember_. Please. He doesn’t want to forget, doesn’t—

The halo comes down, hot-cold on his face, hot-cold in his brain, and there is no escape from this. There is only pain (everywhere, but mostly in muscles forced to clench and spasm), and heat (burning away thoughts, cauterizing what’s left), and light (so bright that it illuminates nothing, too bright to hide from), and the sound of a man screaming through a tattered throat, from far, far away.

(who…? him… him…? he wants to… what?)

Pain, heat, light, screaming, and… And nothing.

No one.

Emptiness.

The birds watch impassively from the garland. They don’t say a single thing.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another brief content warning at the bottom of this one, just in case.

**—City park, Moscow, December 1957—**

He has been settled into his perch on the icy rooftop overlooking an increasingly snow-blanketed park for three hours, twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds when a flash of red and black crosses in front of his rifle scope with the muffled thumping sound of a stack of loose-leaf mission briefing files being dropped from high enough to scatter the pages. He blinks and looks to the side, where the bird has landed on one of the snow-frosted cornices near him.

It’s a dainty little thing, the bird—black along its head and tail feathers, gray at its back with a gray stripe over its black wings, bright red along its fat, rounded belly. It blurbles out a high chittering call, something like mewp-mewp, and hops around on the cornice, inspecting its little patch of roof for whatever it is birds eat before flying off with another fluttering hum of its wings.

He makes a low, incoherent sound in his throat. He doesn’t know why he makes the sound, or what he means by it. Unimportant. Dismissed.

The thin crust of roof ice under the snow where the bird had danced about is still pristine, unmarred by his lightweight visitor. His own patch of roof ice melted hours ago while he waited for his target to emerge from the park’s administration office, though he’s accumulated a fresh layer of snow during his wait. Cold, but good for camouflage, though he doesn’t need it: no one ever looks up.

He shifts position the tiniest bit, puts his eye back to the scope, and resumes his vigil. His target is meeting a woman in this park at the vaguely specified timeframe of “in the afternoon.” His target is employed by the city to oversee the maintenance of the park. His target is, as near as he can extrapolate from the barebones mission briefing, not actually the point of the op. Rather, his target’s death is intended to send a message. Maybe to the woman. Maybe to someone else.

It’s not his place to know these things. It’s his place to deposit a bullet in his target’s brain and return unseen to the extraction point, either before or after he meets the woman, but emphatically before dawn. Or, if there are complications to a long-distance approach, to slit his target’s throat and return unseen to the extraction point; again, timing largely left to his discretion. Or, if everything really falls to shit, to invent some other means of killing his target whenever and wherever he pleases within the pre-dawn window, provided he remains unseen.

He’s given himself until sunset before there’s a need to move on to the next most practical method of completing his mission objective. It would be ideal to take the shot from his current location, confirm the kill through the scope, and return to the designated extraction point without making closer contact. He could have impatiently moved on before now, and could still impatiently leave the roof, cross the park, and slip inside the building to save some time. But he absolutely doesn’t mind making the extraction team wait for him—if anything, making them wait on him is a perk—and long distance is his preference, anyway.

Close-range, personal kills don’t bother him, exactly. But the closer he gets to a target, the more potential witnesses there are, witnesses he will likely need to eliminate: collateral damage. The more collateral damage, the more commotion; and more commotion draws more witnesses, and then around it goes again… It’s just better that he remain unseen, distant and anonymously fatal to his targets. Less complicated. Cleaner, too, most of the time.

And cleanup _is_ a lot easier this way, barring the snowfall that’s currently soaking him through. And not just for him. Killing people in hotel rooms or homes leaves more of a personal mess for their survivors, as compared to a business-as-usual mess for street cleaners and city workers. And why not be considerate if it’s an option? He thinks he used to be a considerate… well, not person. A considerate something.

He’s got until dawn. He could leave the roof and wait elsewhere, to kill the target at home. He has his target’s home address memorized, a pseudo-miracle that will only last until he next sits under the halo. He could go wait there, probably out of the cold weather, too. But while he knows that his target will be meeting a woman at this park outside of his place employment, he does not know for certain whether his target will be returning home tonight.

Except, well. In a manner of speaking, he _does_ know for absolute certain that his target _won’t_ be returning home tonight, but that’s because he’s going to put a bullet in the man’s brain before he has the chance to get there, or possibly a blade through his neck, or possibly something more creative. There’s no car to be crashed, but he supposes he could shoot out the tires of whichever unlucky bus the man boards and hope for an icy skid into something solid. Or there’s the grenade he pocketed while no one was watching him assemble his arsenal for this op. _That’s_ tempting. Grenades are always tempting. But he would prefer to keep the number of deaths down to approximately one, and tossing a grenade in a moving bus doesn’t net that result.

And what kind of person wouldn’t want to die in a beautiful wintry park, anyway? A garbage person, that’s who. Someone with no sense at all of how fucking beautiful blood-on-snow could be. Or looking up through fading vision at bare, twisted tree limbs against a white sky. Or crisp-clean outside air with a lingering hint of gunsmoke. Or the way snowfall makes gunshots sharp and muffled all at once. In short, only a person who was utter garbage and didn’t deserve to _be_ a person would be immune to the poetry of dying in this park. If _he_ were a person, he wouldn’t mind it one bit. If weapons could be jealous—

His avian visitor returns with a cheerful chitter— _mewp-mewp to you, too, pal_ , he thinks at it—and touches down briefly on another cornice before hopping up to perch on the barrel of his rifle. He hadn’t been moving before, exactly—had been essentially frozen in place since he first settled into position, as his covering of snow will attest—but for a moment, his insides seem to freeze to match the outside, breath caught, heartbeat skipping, eyes wide and unblinking.

He swallows, ignores the pain in his throat—no idea where it came from, doesn’t impede mission readiness, ergo unimportant, ignored—and lifts his chin just enough to see the bird without the scope in the way. It lifts a wing and tucks its head under to preen, clean its feathers, maybe, scratch an itch, whatever it is birds do, and then hop from the barrel to the roof and back again.

He stares, irrationally afraid to miss even a fraction of a second. The bird was… kind of cute before, hopping around on the roof beside him. Little puffy dancing thing on its spindly legs with its red belly. This is closer, though, and up close, the bird is… It’s so…

 _Squishy_ , his brain gleefully and loudly supplies out of nowhere, along with the urge to reach out and squish it—but gently. To very _gently_ squish it, just-a-little, not the all the way, just to feel how… How _squishy_ it would be. He ponders the term: squishy, doubts he’s ever had cause to use it before, cannot fathom a future cause for using it, and deems it acceptably descriptive for this situation. The bird is definitely plump, and puffy, and _so damn squishy._

But if he squishes the bird, he will hurt it. He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want anything, of course; the General saw to that. But he particularly doesn’t want anything to hurt the bird.

_The squishy, squishy bird._

It’s like his fucking brain is copying the bird, bouncing around inside his skull chanting “squishy” at him instead of “mewp-mewp.” It would be better if his brain would shut up, or at least find a different word. Except where else will he ever use this word? Nothing in his world has ever been squishy before this.

He wonders vaguely what is wrong with himself, which piece got broken inside, and when. He wonders whether—and how—to include this in his mission debriefing so they can fix it. Because they should fix it, absolutely. But if it’s a passing malfunction, just a temporary and solitary glitch, then he shouldn’t waste the General’s time with it. He’s not sure how to tell. Usually malfunctions are pretty obvious, even if he doesn’t know where they came from. This one is… less obvious.

He can envision a future where he reports to the General that he would absolutely have shot his target from this roof, as it was the most efficient method of completing his mission without unnecessary expenditure of energy or risk of observation, except that there was a passing bird and he opted to very gently squish it instead of very gently pulling his trigger.

The General in this imagined future is not pleased with him.

 _Unacceptable_. He won’t mention the (squishy, squishy!) bird.

But he _will_ , as it turns out, stare at the bird. Beyond being squishy—a word he apparently cannot get enough of, to his immense confusion and irritation—the bird is the gently rounded epitome of contrast, all its component parts at once fitting together beautifully and jarringly different from each other.

Its eyes gleam a wet black, tiny reflective pools rimmed with leathery shorelines, but those abruptly vanish into fluffy wisps of feathers so tiny and delicate it’s hard to pick out the individual fronds that make them up. And the feathers, all softly glimmering fluff, suddenly give way to a hard, sharp beak. Hard and soft, fluffy and wet.

Then there’s the curve of the bird’s (admittedly squishy-looking) belly that his fingers itch to poke—gently, of course—but there’s also the hard-edged wings, folded tightly, sharply angled, and looking nothing at all like downy softness. The legs, matchstick thin, delicate, looking hardly up to the task of supporting any weight at all, entirely composed of scaly, leather-clad straight edges, are tipped with smoothly curving talons he would not mind having replicated as a set of daggers at larger scale.

They wouldn’t be a very useful set of daggers. Pretty, but not half as effective as the seven he’s got scattered about his tac gear. Maybe they’d be better as a gauntlet. They’d do alright as a bit of climbing gear, or as a set of tools to disembowel a target when causing pain is the primary goal and a regular knife would be too quick, too sharp. Still, with the Arm, neither of those purposes would be better served by a set of talon-style daggers inspired by a squishy bird.

It’s a frivolous thought. He shouldn’t have those. Maybe something _is_ broken.

The bird hops the full length of his rifle’s barrel as he busily and pointlessly thinks stupid things, then chitters happily—mewp-mewp—as it hops back the other way. Its little feet tap against the metal as the puff of colorful feathers bounces along. Its little head turns this way and that, looking for all the world like there is no neck under the all those ruffling feathers, nothing made of bones and ligaments that is responsible for the motion.

There are so many fluffy, puffy feathers that the whole thing looks like a squishy lump on stilts, just more delicate and fragile than a typical lump would be.

He could—and probably would—watch the bird for hours, utterly transfixed, if it deigned to stay with him for that long. Even at the expense of shooting his target through the skull. _Well_ , he thinks, _no. Not that_. That sort of failure went far beyond merely disappointing the General. And certainly no bird, however squishy the damn thing might be, could ever warrant such a thing. He has until sunset or until his target comes out to meet the woman, whichever comes first, before he has to make any decisions that would include leaving the bird behind.

In the end, he doesn’t have any such choices to make, because there is a muffled but sudden banging sound from across the park and the bird disappears in a flutter of red and gray. He snaps his attention to the source of the sound—a slammed door in the administration building—dips his head to the scope once more, and there is his target, making his way down the stairs, framed by the crosshairs and… Oh.

Holding a little boy’s hand. That’s a shame.

He scans the rest of the park, gaze and scope lingering on likely benches. There is no woman in the park yet. So only the one potential witness to eliminate. Still a shame.

He returns his attention to the target, sights through the scope, adjusts a bit to one side to frame the target’s head properly once more. Exhales. Pulls the trigger during the stillness of empty lungs, in the moments between heartbeats.

The target’s head makes a large red mess behind him as the rest of his body tumbles down the stairs to sprawl out in the snow. Beautiful, the red against white, the contrast of light and dark, hot and cold, clean and unutterably filthy. His target didn’t get a chance to observe it, but if he had, surely he’d have seen the poetry. Would have appreciated his own contribution to the tableau.

The child screams, cries, stands frozen in place, staring and making noise.

A real fucking shame.

He shifts the rifle down and further to the side, studies the boy now centered in the sights.

Assessment. Too young to pinpoint a shooter’s location. Too young, perhaps, to recognize the gunshot for what it was, to know that there _was_ a shooter, and that the target’s head didn’t just… do that. On its own. Who knew what went on in a child’s mind. Not him. That’s outside his skillset.

Assessment. Too distraught to make a solid identification even if he did know which snow-covered mound to pin the blame on and happened to look closely enough to see beyond the snow. Even if he were older than his… however many years. Other than “small,” how did one place a child’s age. Again, outside his skillset.

Assessment. Wailing so loudly that anyone drawn to the scene will be focused on him, and not a distant rooftop. He hopes _someone_ will be drawn there, to see to the child; maybe the woman. Where is she. Is she late. Is it still technically afternoon. When did afternoon officially end and evening start to creep in. Maybe he’ll ask the General, if he remembers to later.

Assessment. Young, distraught, loud: possibly traumatized. No need to kill the boy. Excellent.

He retreats to the other side of the roof and shakes off the snow before dismantling and packing up the rifle. It’s not even a minute later that he’s down off the roof and leaving the child’s cries and the poetry of death behind him in the park as he makes his way to the extraction point.

 

* * *

 

**—Underground HYDRA-run KGB facility, Kursk Oblast, December 1957—**

“I see. And your reason for leaving the boy alive?”

From another, those words would be a test. From the General, they are curiosity, a desire to understand the inside of his damaged head, a gift of attempted connection when the General has no reason to stoop so low as to connect with him.

He ignores the hands that finish stripping him of his tac gear as he stands before the General, letting the support team jerk his arms and legs into position as they unbuckle wet leather straps, pull boots off, maneuver him like the object he is. They don’t matter. Only the General matters.

“He would not have been capable of providing witness.” He clears his throat, still stiff and painful, no idea why. “Too young, distraught. Possibly traumatized.”

Now the support team is coming at him with damp towels, wiping down his hands and arms, his face, his legs and feet. A solid point in favor of the long-distance approach is the lack of the hose. There’s only a bit of grit from the rooftop and the damp of snowmelt to deal with. No need for the hassle of scouring blood off him with high-pressure water, no need to open up the Arm and dig out embedded fragments of what was once a human being.

The General is raising an eyebrow, is smiling, is amused. “Only possibly?”

His brows pinch for a fraction of a moment and his eyes dart to the side. It’s not a challenge to his interpretation of the boy’s reaction—the General would never have cause to challenge him; the General could only ever correct him outright because he would be wrong if the General said anything that contradicted him—but it’s not a correction, either. What is it. What?

One of the support team wrings out his hair. Distracting, having them near his face. He needs to think about the General’s use of humor, not the support team with their towels and the fresh cryosuit they’re dragging over his head and pulling his arms through, tugging up over his legs and zipping everywhere. The fucking thing has so many zippers.

The General stands, amusement timed out, replaced with the next practical item listed in his personal agenda. He holds up a book—flash of black Roman lettering against gray background, too fast to read or see more than horses in a… a field?—and sets it on the table to the side of his chair. “For you.”

A gift. For him. He’s momentarily disoriented by the wave of giddy gratitude, hears only the sounds and not the words as the General speaks to the support team busily checking all the ports in the cryosuit where the monitors will be placed to keep track of him in the cold, illuminating the inside of the cryochamber with nightmare-blue light as they relay his vitals.

There’s only a minor fuss from the support team at the idea that he should be in his chair while they sleep upstairs. He wonders at the fuss—minor or otherwise, where do they think they stand with the General that they have any right to argue against anything he says?—but it’s not something that requires his input. The General is in no danger here.

He settles in his chair, runs his hands along the arms before exhaling. He won’t sleep tonight—that’s still not permitted—but this is much better than the little metal bench. He hasn’t earned it, hasn’t deserved it, but it’s protocol. And they’re finally following it. It’s an unimaginable relief.

He feels the General’s hand on his shoulder, his expression neutral, his voice soft. “You did just fine, Soldier. Next time, shoot the boy. It’ll make a bigger impact. It will deliver my message more clearly.”

It’s not a reprimand. It could have been. It could have been a beating, or a scolding, or both. It could have been pain and damage and fear. Maybe even should have been, if he were willing to second-guess the General’s decisions. Which he’s not. The General is trying to share insights, to let him know how to do his job better. He appreciates the General’s efforts. He will learn.

“…Understood.” And he does understand. About the boy, about the message. About clarity. Doesn’t like it, but that’s not his place, liking or disliking things. That’s for people to do, and he’s not a person. He’s just the weapon, aimed and fired as his owners see fit. As the General sees fit. The General gave him that gift.

The General’s hand on his shoulder squeezes and holds, then relaxes and pats his shoulder a few times. “Good.”

The praise is slight—he hasn’t done anything to earn more effusive praise—but it warms him as thoroughly as the cryosuit during a thaw cycle, and almost as painfully, deep inside where he would otherwise merely ache. He can feel the General’s hand like a warm blanket wrapped over his shoulder, even after he withdraws it.

He sighs tiredly, lets his head tip back against his chair, and watches the General herd the technicians up the stairs in front of him like they are obstacles in his path. They probably are. The General has ambitions. The General has three stars. The General hates this support team as much as he does.

The support team hasn’t left instruction, but the General has left him a book. It’s obvious he’s meant to read it, absorb its contents, possibly report on it when the General next visits. It might even be early mission briefing for something. But he can’t bring himself to look away from the General when the man is within viewing range. The book can wait until the General disappears from sight, as he eventually does—walking past a thick rope of greenery looped along the railings of an upper level landing.

The greenery catches his attention with a weird echoing resonance, even as his metal fingers pluck the book from the table beside his chair where the General left it. The title, now that he can properly inspect it, proclaims it to be a history of Mongolia. Histories are always interesting. The horses on the cover are less interesting, but he anticipates horses being a somehow important aspect of the history, given that they made the cover. Maybe they will become more interesting as he reads about them.

It is several minutes, very nearly an hour, of staring uncomprehendingly at the first page of the book before the thought that’s sidelined him finally coalesces into words. _Garland_ , he thinks. _On the railing. Those are called garland._

He looks up from the page, stares, narrows his eyes thoughtfully in consideration. There are glittering _things_ nestled in the garland. Balls, and birds, and ribbons…

Some of the birds are red. They look… new.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea about the specifics of any parks in Moscow. But the squishy, squishy bird is this little guy here: a male [Eurasian bullfinch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_bullfinch). 
> 
> Is that not just the squishiest little dumpling of a bird?
> 
> Also, content warning: There is another brief reference alluding to suicidal ideation. Very brief, very vague.


	5. Coda

**—Underground HYDRA-run KGB facility, Kursk Oblast, December 1959; two years later—**

His place is three feet behind the General and one foot to the right, and he does not deviate from this, regardless of where the General moves throughout the base. The first stop on this inspection had been the prep room—the pit, they’d called it during the inspection—and from there, the upper levels, one by one.

Technically, it’s a HYDRA base. This one, he thinks, was always a HYDRA base. Not so much infiltrated by a cadre of moles and gradually turned over—as an increasing amount of bases are these days, to his immense disgust—but built from the sub-levels up by the many-headed fuckers themselves and maintained with a steady crop of HYDRA assholes.

Regardless of the base’s provenance, it’s still part of Department X under the KGB, still a node in the system that maintains the Winter Soldier project, still under the General’s purview. Importantly: Still vulnerable to inspection, failure, reconfiguration of staff.

He does not want things—the General cured him of that during some foggy chapter of his long-forgotten past. But he does harbor a flickering hope that this base in particular will fail the General’s inspection and that the reconfiguration of staff—he _loves_ that euphemism—involves reconfiguration of individual pieces of individual members of the support team. He’d not-so-secretly enjoy ripping up their tracheas if they put up any resistance to the General’s decisions.

He has no idea why that specific image is so pleasing, but it’s not his place to wonder about it, so he lets it go. He’ll tear throats or he won’t. It’s not up to him.

He’s not here because the General requires any help in assessing the base. The General knows he isn’t qualified to make any such assessment himself and that he wouldn’t be of any help. But there isn’t a single base across the entire Soviet Union that wouldn’t follow up a failed inspection with at least an attempt at failure to submit to reconfiguration.

Not everyone owns their failures as readily as he does.

No, he is there to enforce the General’s assessment. So far, the base has proven to be compliant with the protocols set forth by the Winter Soldier project, and the support staff—everyone from structural engineering crew, to mechanical and medical technicians, to data specialists and arborists—at every level has proven to be more afraid of deviating from local project standards than of falling into HYDRA’s long-distance bad graces.

It looks increasingly like there will be no reconfiguration. But there is still the base’s commanding officer left to inspect, along with all his personal effects and connections.

“Stay.”

He freezes in place, eyes flicking to the flat-handed gesture that accompanies the General’s word and then back to the General himself. Other handlers require verbal demonstration of compliance, but the General is more confident in his programming. It gives him a warm feeling of “well done” every time the General’s confidence in him is put on display. Now is no different. He basks in the General’s confidence.

The General disappears into one of the offices on this level, and when the words of the General’s conversation with the base commander are sufficiently clear that he’s certain he can keep a watch without actually observing—including monitoring where the occupants of that office are positioned—he turns his back on the door and keeps his visuals trained on the landing itself.

Right. This is the base with the fucking garland everywhere. He’d managed to tune it out when the General was in his field of vision—the General has a tendency to preoccupy his thoughts somewhat, and the garland hadn’t been housing a threat that he could see, so it slipped from his mind.

Now it’s very much _in_ his mind. Green and a lot fluffier than he… remembers?

Yes. He definitely saw the garland before this base inspection. Maybe even stared at it for hours at a time. Who the hell would have left him awake and without a task for that long? Why? He hasn’t read the actual protocol lists for the Winter Soldier project—it’s above his security level, reading about himself—but it doesn’t sound like good stewardship, leaving him idle for more than a few minutes at a time, maybe half an hour at the outside.

The General would have assigned him something to occupy his thoughts. Some puzzle to sort out, or a problem to solve, or sometimes a language to learn, or something to read through. The General must not have been there when they let him stare at garland for hours on end.

He takes a step toward the railing, looks over the side into the pit. That’s where he belonged, the last time he was here. It looks so different from up above. There’s his chair, the halo looming in miniature from this distance. There’s the cryochamber, nothing special there. The stupid, ineffectual barred area with the metal bench. Tile, hoses, chains. A prep room like every other prep room, just deeper in the ground than at most other bases and called mean names.

The General’s voice behind him is raised, but not in anger. Irritation, but not-with-him, not- _at_ -him. That’s good. He hates disappointing the General. He parses the words being exchanged in the office he’s not been invited to—not even _about_ him—and lets them drift back out of his mind. He’ll come when called, or when he detects a threat to the General. Until then, his orders are to stay. He is ready to comply.

And with compliance comes reward—not a guarantee, but a pattern often enough, when the General is involved. This reward: He has the time—in between glowering at members of the support team who think about walking past him, and then change their minds and choose a different path—to stare at the garland.

Specifically, at this tiny, red bird that is tucked between two green fronds.

It is… ridiculously tiny. Insanely delicate. Bizarrely shiny. Its eyes are little black beads. Its beak is a tiny piece of… he’s not sure. He’d have to touch it to find out, or to bend down for an even closer look. From where he’s standing, just a scant four feet away, he can see tiny orange seed beads making up dainty feet, wired to the branch so that the bird will never fall from its garland perch.

That’s just as well, since the poor creature hasn’t got proper wings. Just has the shape of a bird, not all the working parts of a bird. Like he has the shape of a person. But the bird’s shape—what an exquisite little thing, what a wonder, in glossy crimsons and rich carmines, with little sequins overlapping to form the feathers along its head and belly. Longer beads, mostly red with a few in glittering black, are threaded to give the impression of feathers along folded wings.

_I could touch it._

The thought comes from nowhere and everywhere, showing up suddenly from every direction, and it surprises him into taking a step back from the railing with the garland and its bird. He looks out across the open well of the pit and his eyes pick out birds… everywhere. He’d seen them before, of course, but hadn’t cataloged them as a threat. They still aren’t threats, but it strikes him suddenly that there are _so many_ birds.

_This support team must really like birds._

He decides that if he’s asked for an opinion later, that will be his opinion. That they like birds a lot. He’s not sure it’s a safe opinion—the General might be looking for something more strategic, less stupid. But there are so many birds in the garland. Every railing has at least a half dozen of the little beadcraft avians, mostly in gold and silver, but with at least one red bird in each.

There are so many that he could probably _take_ one, not just touch it. He takes a step closer to the railing, to the garland. Takes a step to the side, closer to the loop of greenery where the bird nests, zeroing in on it. Swallows. He doesn’t notice doing this, one tiny, shuffling step at a time. His mind isn’t on moving; his mind is on the bird.

They’d never miss one—HYDRA operatives are not as observant as they could be, one of the few points in their favor as far as he’s concerned. Less observant equals easier to kill some day. When the General decides to burn them out of the country.

He has enough pouches and pockets in his tac gear. And one of those little birds— _a red one; I would take a red one_ —one of the little _red_ birds would fit exactly right in one of the pouches that are supposed to be, and are currently, filled with grenades. Can’t be one of the open loops. The bird would be visible. But the pouches. With the flaps. A bird could fit. A bird could hide. One of the red ones.

He would give up a grenade in order to have one of the little red birds. He could part with a grenade. It probably wouldn’t even be missed, just like the bird. No one ever sees fit to do inventory on what he brings back from the field. They’re more concerned with sending him out properly equipped to scratch everyone off his list and blow everything to pieces that’s slated for destruction.

He slowly lowers himself to a crouch in front of the railing, lost in thoughts he would be afraid to entertain except he’s caught by the glittering bird not a foot from his nose.

He always reports accurately what he’s used in the field—how many bullets, which guns, grenades or no grenades, missing knives, bloody garrotes: He’s very specific in his mission reports. It’s a point of pride, and he doesn’t have many of those. Sometimes his handlers have to order him to shut up and summarize because they don’t want as many details as he has to offer. Not the General. The General always wants to hear everything he has to report.

But the General won’t need to take his report; he’s right here. It will be someone else. Some other handler. Maybe no report at all. So no one will check his tac gear for a tiny, fragile, red beadcraft bird. If he is quick enough, sneaky enough, he could stash the bird somewhere and then— He licks his lips. And then _not tell anyone what he’s done_ or where he’s put it. If he doesn’t tell them, they can’t take it from him, can’t make him forget _specifically that thing_.

A general wipe under the halo wouldn’t take something like the bird unless he told them about it and the— the— He swallows again, hard. And _that_ team was called in. _That_ team, if _they_ calibrated the halo—or the… the other… if they burned it out. He sucks in a breath, shoves his thoughts sideways, away from the gaps.

The bird isn’t part of his mission, so he wouldn’t _have_ to report it, even if someone did want a report. They would never know. No other teams need to be involved.

It can be just his, just him and this bird, no one else in on it, no one to take it away from him.

Slowly, so slowly he doesn’t register his own movements, he reaches his right index finger out toward the bird, the little red one. He really could touch it. It might be pushing the bounds of possibility to successfully _take_ the bird, keep it secret, hide it—remember it later—but he could absolutely touch it. No one said he couldn’t.

Its beak will be sharp. That’s a tiny piece of orange glass; he can see that now, so close to it, crouched right in front of it, almost nose-to-nose with it. How sharp? His finger inches closer.

“ _Soldier_.” The General. “On your feet.”

He stands and spins around in one fluid motion, snapping to attention before the General has even finished his command. He did not hear the General open that door. That is a failure on his part. The shame burns through him hotter than the halo ever could.

The General is looking up at him, eyes narrowed, lips thin, pursed in displeasure. He deserves that. He deserves worse. After everything the General has done for him, has given him, has fashioned him into.

 _Does he want a verbal confirmation?_ He runs through the odds in his mind. Odds are better that a verbal confirmation will be interpreted as “cheek,” and so he says nothing. Where there is a risk of disrespect toward the General, he always leans toward caution. So he simply stands, ready to comply, ready to accept a reprimand that could be physical but is more likely to be verbal.

The base’s commanding officer clears his throat. It’s not to get their attention; it’s just nerves. No one would ever prefer for this sort of attention to be leveled at themselves if someone else could bear it instead.

The sound prompts the General to end his disappointed, pinched silence, though. “Does that ornament interest you, Soldier?”

It had actually slipped entirely from his mind the moment the General had ordered him to stand, but now it slides back into place, red and glittering and delicate. He weighs his response. Truth, obviously. He isn’t even capable of lying to the General. But what is the General really asking? It’s _obvious_ he was interested. He was staring right at it instead of standing where he was directed.

The General allows him time to answer, despite the officer fidgeting uncomfortably in the stretching silence. The General wants him to answer the right question—correctly—and is willing to wait, as always. He appreciates the kindness. The General doesn’t try to trick him. The General wants him to succeed. It’s not the General’s fault he’s an abject failure regardless of the endless chances he’s given.

“It’s beautiful,” he finally answers. “I enjoy looking at it.”

“Do you want it?” The General sweeps his hand wide to indicate the garland all around the base. “Or any of them?”

“I don’t…” He blinks, then slowly shakes his head. “No. I just… liked… looking at it.” He stops, then starts. “It’s so delicate.” He frowns. “Fragile, I think. It looks fragile. I could have _touched_ it.”

The General makes a considering noise in his throat, looks at the garland, the flock of birds spread throughout the wide central stairwell of the base. “These were here last year as well. And the year before.” He turns to face the base officer. “You put them up every year, is that right?”

The officer stammers something about holiday spirit, and festivities, and replacing the other ornaments with more birds, and other garbage nonsense that he doesn’t bother registering in any specific detail. Not while the General is speaking to him without words, while the General Looks at him, Looks inside him, taking a measurement of something he can’t place.

He is still trying to translate the General’s expression into words when the General continues. “They’re outside of regulation,” the General snaps at the officer, gesturing at the nearest garland.

He is speaking to the officer, but Looking at _him_. That’s part of the message. This is meant for him. This is directed at him. The words are for the officer, but the results are for him. The General adjusts the collar of his coat, brusque, no nonsense, already finished with this conversation. “Take them down and burn them.”

A nameless screeching objection crawls into his throat, but he kills it while it's still merely an unintelligible, strangled noise that he chokes on, swallows back down as he struggles to rearrange his expression back into ready-to-comply stillness. Struggles to breathe. Struggles to keep his full-body shudder contained and partially fails, the Arm giving a whirring mechanical voice to the distress he otherwise smothers.

The General Looks at him, reads him, knows the inside of his head better than he does, but even so, he desperately scrambles to hide that he wants—yes, he fucking _wants_ , damn it—for the birds to be safe. For them not to be burned, not to be destroyed. For them to perch in the garland and glitter in the harsh lighting and be beautiful and delicate and perfect forever.

The officer stammers and looks from the General to the garland and back. He raises a hand to snap off a salute. “Y-yes, sir. I'll… I’ll see to it personally.”

The General perfunctorily returns the salute but otherwise doesn’t bestow any attention to the man as he scurries off. The General is still Looking at him instead, radiating… He frowns again. The General is not displeased, not disappointed, not disgusted. He’s… satisfied? Sympathetic? Regretful?

“They _are_ beautiful, Soldier.”

The General’s voice is low, both in tone and volume. He’s speaking for him alone. The General understands. He _does_ regret. Not the burning of the garland and the birds, but something. The General has regrets, about… something. He doesn’t know what. It’s not his place to know. But the General should not have regrets, and he feels remorse for inspiring that.

“Sometimes the beautiful things in this world compromise the necessary things. You are among the necessary things, Soldier. It’s a lamentable state of affairs.” The General nods toward the stairs toward the roof, a gesture for him to go first, perhaps hold the door at the top open for him.

It is a dangerous gesture, and he does not know why.

“You’ve never been to the top of this base,” the General tells him. “You should see it.”

Ah. That is why. That is what makes it dangerous. He can see the shape of it now. This is his reprimand, the one he deserves.

The view from the rooftop over the base itself, as it turns out, is no different from the view from the helipad at the hidden transport entrance half a mile to the west, with the exception of the smoke rising from the beginnings of the garland fire where the arborists have determined it will be easiest to blend into the landscape without any danger to the base or its surrounding forest.

They stand there for a very long time, watching the smoke rise. He wasn’t specifically told to watch, but he knows that he is supposed to. It’s what the General meant, even if it isn’t what he said. He heard the unspoken command: _Look at the smoke, Soldier, and know that the garland is burning. Know that the birds are burning. Watch_ everything _burn. You did this, Soldier. You earned this; here, this is for you. Do better next time._

He watches the smoke rise, and he can hear them. All the little birds, melting and catching fire. He imagines their beaded feathers fusing together and curling up and blackening and turning into so much smoke and ash. Screaming while they die. While they’re _reconfigured_ —and the euphemism is not so satisfying now, tastes bitter and treacherous like the smoke on the thin, frigid air.

He deserves this, but they don’t.

The birds scream at him, “Goodbye, Soldier; good riddance, Soldier; your fault, Soldier,” and he is… he is ready to… He remembers, now. They had an arrangement, once upon a time. The call-and-response. But he doesn’t know any response to what they are screaming now. There might not be one. What should he say to them. What _could_ he say. There is no apology strong enough. He swallows his grief down where no one will find it and take it from him, and silently mourns the loss of the birds.

After another hour, the General seems to think the point has been made, and waves him back toward the rooftop door. He follows the General back down inside the base, the door shutting out the cold air but not the avian screams. The railings are bare, and that hurts, stabs at him and twists. It would have been nice to touch one of them, one of his little birds, before they died. Maybe save one of them.

A red one.

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warning: There is a brief reference to past attempts at suicide, and equally brief flirtation with oblivion. No specifics are given, and the references themselves are truly brief.


End file.
